Albert Einstein Quotes

Creativity

  • The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
  • Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
  • I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
  • When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
  • The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
  • To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
  • True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
  • The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
  • It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Life

  • A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
  • Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
  • Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
  • Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
  • I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
  • Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
  • Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
  • Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
  • I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.
  • I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
  • I have just got a new theory of eternity.
  • Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
  • Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
  • There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
  • The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

Mathematics

  • Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
  • As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
  • Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Love

  • Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
  • Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
  • Love is a better teacher than duty.
  • Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
  • When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
  • Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Science

  • Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours.
  • Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
  • If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
  • If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
  • Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
  • It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
  • It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.
  • It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.
  • Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
  • Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
  • When the solution is simple, God is answering.
  • The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
  • The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.
  • Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
  • The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.
  • To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
  • Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
  • The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
  • Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
  • The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
  • All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Thinking and Knowledge

  • He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
  • Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
  • I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
  • I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
  • I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
  • I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
  • A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. Information is not knowledge.
  • It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
  • Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will.
  • Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.
  • Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
  • Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
  • Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
  • Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.
  • Never lose a holy curiosity.
  • No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
  • On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
  • Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
  • When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
  • You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
  • The only source of knowledge is experience.
  • The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
  • We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
  • The important thing is not to stop questioning.
  • The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
  • The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
  • We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
  • The only real valuable thing is intuition.
  • There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.
  • Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.